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Dynatrace vs Datadog: Side-By-Side Comparison for DEM in 2023

When it comes to Digital Experience Management (DEM) tools, two names that are often brought up are Dynatrace and Datadog. These tools help businesses monitor and manage their applications, infrastructure, and user experience. But when it comes to Dynatrace vs Datadog, which tool is better suited for your needs?

One key difference between the two tools is their approach to application monitoring. Dynatrace leverages AI-powered monitoring to provide in-depth insights into user experience, application performance, and infrastructure monitoring. On the other hand, Datadog uses machine learning to identify patterns and provides actionable insights to optimize applications.

Another key difference is that Dynatrace can automatically detect and map the entire application environment, while Datadog is known for its flexibility and ability to monitor diverse and complex environments.

Additionally, Dynatrace offers various analytics and reporting features, whereas Datadog provides real-time alerts and correlation analysis.

These are just a few examples of how Dynatrace and Datadog differ in their capabilities. In this article, we take a closer look at Dynatrace vs Datadog, compare their features, pricing models, and strengths and weaknesses. And to make things even more interesting, we also talk about appNeura, an up-and-coming player in the DEM market that offers a more effective and cost-efficient solution.

Let’s get started:

Dynatrace vs Datadog: Feature Comparison

Before we dive into the detailed comparison of Dynatrace and Datadog, let’s take a quick look at their latest market share. According to a recent report by Datanyze, Dynatrace holds 19.47% of the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) market, while Datadog holds 5.73%. Although Datadog has a lesser market share, it still is one of the biggest competitors of Dynatrace.

Both Dynatrace and Datadog offer a range of features and functionalities that can help businesses with their application performance management needs. Now, let’s take a closer look at the key features and functionalities of both tools, and see how they compare against each other:

Basic Functionality Comparisons:

Both Dynatrace and Datadog offer almost the same DEM capabilities, but their focus and strengths differ slightly.

Dynatrace is an end-to-end observability platform that provides monitoring tools for modern infrastructures, distributed applications, user experience, and business intelligence. It has a more advanced and better integrated AI-powered engine, especially for APM.

On the other hand, Datadog is well-known for its infrastructure and security monitoring capabilities. Its APM solution offers end-to-end application performance monitoring that allows users to collect and monitor requests, traces, and logs. With advanced features, it can also correlate this data and create actionable insights.

Feature	Dynatrace	Datadog
Infrastructure monitoring	YY	YY
Log management	YY	YY
Cloud Security Monitoring	Y (Some AI features available)	YY
APM	YY	Y (Limited capabilities)
RUM	YY	YY
Modified Apdex Score	N	N
Incident Management	Y	Y (Alert notifications not available)
User-based access	YY	YY
Status Pages	YY (Status page tightly integrated with DEM solution)	Y
SLA Monitoring	YY	YY
Lightweight SDK integration	N	N

YY : Feature fully present

Y : Feature partially-present

N : Feature not present

Monitoring Capabilities:

As mentioned in the introduction, Dynatrace offers a range of monitoring capabilities that use AI to provide insights into the entire application stack. This includes user experience, app performance, and infrastructure. It can also detect and map the entire application environment automatically and provide deep insights into digital user experience, application performance, and infrastructure monitoring.

On the other hand, Datadog provides a flexible and robust monitoring solution that includes customizable dashboards, anomaly detection, and several technology integrations. It offers comprehensive monitoring of cloud infrastructure, applications, and logs. Datadog’s strength lies in its ability to integrate with many third-party tools, making it an ideal choice for organizations with complex environments.

Analytics and Reporting:

Dynatrace uses an AI-powered analytics engine that can automatically detect issues and provide actionable insights to enhance your application’s performance. Dynatrace also offers customizable dashboards, custom charts, and real-time data streaming, giving you a complete monitoring solution. Plus, it supports APIs that allow you to generate reporting data programmatically.

Datadog, on the other hand, has its own range of analytics and reporting features, including customizable dashboards, real-time alerts, and correlation analysis. With its machine learning capabilities, Datadog can help organizations identify patterns and optimize their applications. It also provides a RESTful API that makes it easy to integrate with other systems and automate reporting tasks.

Integration and Deployments:

Dynatrace makes it easy for users to get started with a streamlined and user-friendly deployment process. The setup instructions are clear, and users only need to execute three code snippets provided by Dynatrace to deploy the agent. What’s great about Dynatrace is that users can configure the agent from the web UI, which makes setting up log monitoring and APM a breeze.

Additionally, users can instrument their application code with Open Telemetry, which is recommended by Dynatrace’s documentation, to start gathering distributed traces.

On the other hand, Datadog’s initial setup is a bit more complex than Dynatrace, but it offers a more tailored solution. The setup process is similar to Dynatrace, but users need to visit multiple configuration files, such as datadog.yaml and technology-specific config files. Enabling log capturing requires some additional groundwork.

To set up APM, users can use Datadog’s web-UI configuration tool to create their execution script, configure additional parameters, and instrument their application code with dd-trace.

Alerting and Notification:

Dynatrace’s alerting and notification capabilities are relatively limited out-of-the-box. Users can access issues from the problems UI and set up monitoring based on events in several categories, such as monitoring availability, errors, slowdowns, resource usage, and custom events. However, Dynatrace lacks many of the advanced features that other monitoring tools offer.

On the other hand, Datadog offers almost complete incident management features, making it an ideal choice for organizations that require robust alerting and notification capabilities. Datadog’s incident management tool allows users to create incidents, rank them by severity, assign responsible users and teams, draft post-mortems, and send basic email and Slack notifications. Datadog also makes it relatively easy to declare and manage incidents from events and monitors.

UI/UX and Documentation

Dynatrace’s UI can be overwhelming, with a lot of data presented all at once. However, their documentation provides ample support for deploying, setting up, and tweaking the OneAgent. While Dynatrace University offers a good starting point, it may not match up to Datadog’s Learning Center.

Datadog’s UI is simple but with some minor design flaws. Their documentation is well-written but not very well-structured. However, Datadog’s Learning Center goes further, offering web-based coding labs that give new users hands-on experience in a simulated environment. This approach helps users dive into the workflow right from the start.

Dynatrace vs Datadog: Pricing Comparison

Dynatrace offers a flexible pricing model that allows customers to choose either full-stack pricing or individual product pricing. The full-stack tier starts at $74 per 8GB per host, while individual products are priced based on their specific functionality. However, add-ons such as Application Security are not included in the pricing.

In contrast, Datadog’s pricing model is decentralized, with each product having its pricing logic. APM & Continuous Profiler and Infrastructure Monitoring are priced per host, while other features such as log management are billed based on ingested data, and incident management is billed per contributing user. Datadog does not offer full-platform pricing but instead arranges it with their sales team, with the option of volume discounts.

To make it simple:

Cost per host:

• • Dynatrace offers a full-stack pricing model starting at $74 per 8GB per host.

• • Datadog’s APM & Continuous Profiler is priced per host, as is infrastructure monitoring.

Free trial options:

• • Both Dynatrace and Datadog offer free trials.

• • Dynatrace offers a 15-day trial for its SaaS and a 30-day trial for its managed offering.

• • Datadog offers a 14-day trial for its SaaS offering.

Additional costs for extra features or services:

• • Dynatrace’s Application Security works as an add-on and isn’t included in the pricing.

• • Dynatrace’s pricing isn’t unified, ranging from prepaid Digital Experience Units to Dynatrace-specific Davis Data Units (DDUs).

• • DDUs depend on the volume of external data ingested into the platform.

• • Datadog’s log management feature is billed based on ingested data, and incident management is billed per contributing user.

• • Datadog has no full-platform pricing available, but volume discounts are an option with their sales team.

Pros and cons of both Pricing models:

• • Dynatrace’s pricing model allows customers to pick and choose the products they need, while Datadog’s decentralized model may make it harder to compare costs.

• • However, Datadog’s pricing model allows for more flexibility and customization, with the ability to choose which products to pay for and how much to use.

• • Dynatrace’s pricing can be complex due to the use of different units for billing

• • In contrast, Datadog’s pricing is simpler to understand, but customers may need to pay separately for each feature they use.

appNeura: The Better Choice

appNeura is a Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solution that uses AI and machine learning to help businesses enhance their end-users’ experiences. Developed by Avekhshaa Technologies, appNeura offers an easy-to-integrate SDK that only requires a few lines of code to be added to the applications.

appNeura provides real-time insights into application performance, helping businesses like yours identify and proactively resolve issues before they impact end-users. By monitoring various performance parameters, including third-party JavaScript performance, image loading, and Ajax requests, appNeura simplifies corrective actions and helps businesses stay on top of their customers’ needs.

Using predictive analytics, the tool also forecasts app failures, and resolves issues across various channels. The main objective of appNeura is to help digital enterprises deliver world-class experiences to their customers, making it easier for them to manage and maintain their applications.

Why is appNeura the better choice?

After exploring the features, pros, and cons of Dynatrace and Datadog, it’s time to delve into the reasons why appNeura outperforms these tools in specific areas. Here are 8 solid reasons why appNeura is a superior option compared to Dynatrace and Datadog:

#1. Lightweight Integration: Unlike Dynatrace and Datadog, appNeura’s SDK can be easily integrated into applications with just a few lines of code, making it quicker and simpler to get up and running. Unlike Dynatrace, appNeura doesn’t require agents to be installed on every server or device, making it easier to implement and manage.

#2. Advanced Analytics: While both Dynatrace and Datadog offer log monitoring capabilities, appNeura takes it a step further with its AI and ML-powered log analytics, providing more detailed insights into the root causes of issues. appNeura’s machine learning algorithms can analyze a broader range of performance parameters, including third-party JavaScript, image loading, and Ajax requests.

#3. Web Vitals: appNeura focuses on Web Vitals, which are a set of metrics by Google to measure the user experience on the web. By monitoring and analyzing these metrics, appNeura helps businesses to optimize their web pages for better performance and user experience. This is a feature that is not as prominent in Dynatrace and Datadog, giving appNeura an advantage in optimizing web performance.

#4. Smarter Alerting: appNeura’s smarter alerting system uses intelligent algorithms to analyze and prioritize alerts based on their impact, allowing for faster response times and reduced downtime. appNeura’s SDK buffers data every 15 seconds and responds to mobile devices if time exceeds the threshold.

#5. Customizable Dashboards: appNeura’s customizable dashboards provide businesses with the flexibility to monitor and track performance metrics that are specific to their applications and business goals, unlike Dynatrace and Datadog which may have limited dashboard customization options. This enables businesses to focus on the metrics that matter most to them and make more informed decisions.

#7. Proactive Monitoring: With appNeura, businesses can identify and resolve issues before they affect end-users, which helps to maintain a positive user experience and prevent any loss of revenue or damage to the organization’s reputation. Dynatrace and Datadog also offer real-time monitoring, but they may not offer the same level of proactive monitoring that appNeura provides.

#8. ApDex Health Indicator: appNeura’s patented ApDex feature provides businesses with a simple and clear indicator of the health of their applications. This feature allows users to quickly understand their app’s overall performance using a percentage score, a numerical scale, or color-coded indicators of green, amber, and red. With ApDex, businesses can quickly identify and address issues, ensuring a smooth user experience.

#9. Predictive Analytics: appNeura’s Predictive analytics is an advantage over Dynatrace and Datadog. While Dynatrace and Datadog offer some level of monitoring and alerting, they do not have the same predictive capabilities as appNeura. This means that businesses using appNeura are more likely to avoid potential issues and downtime, resulting in a better experience for their customers.

How appNeura Helped a Life Insurance Company  Achieve Better Business Outcomes?

A life insurance company wanted to enhance the digital experience of its customers by investing in technology to reduce processing time and ensure easy accessibility of services from any device. They partnered with appNeura’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) product to address these challenges.

One of the benefits of using appNeura’s DEM was that it provided actionable insights and predictive analytics about the quality of service (QoS) of their apps. This helped the life insurance company in identifying the areas where they could improve customer experience and engagement. For instance, by analyzing login-to-disbursement and loan application-to-disbursement ratios, appNeura identified OTP authentication, document upload, and page design flaws as the main culprits for high dropouts.

With the solutions applied at every drop-out stage, the life insurance company was able to achieve a 20% improvement in login-to-loan application conversion, 20% improvement in customer document upload process, 15% improvement in KYC processes, and 20% improvement in disbursement process. Additionally, by using appNeura’s DEM, the life insurance company was able to improve its launch page response time by 3X and reduce bounce rate from 31.20% to 11.1%, leading to a 25% increase in daily visitor count.

Ready to take your customer experience to the next level? Try appNeura today and see the difference it can make for your business. Contact us now and experience the power of proactive monitoring, real-time insights, and AI-driven optimization for yourself!

Conclusion

In this article, we compared Dynatrace vs Datadog over various metrics and talked about appNeura. We also saw that appNeura offers a more comprehensive APM solution with advanced features like patented ApDex score and Web Vitals. appNeura’s ability to give AI-Powered recommendations to identify and resolve critical issues quickly, along with its user-friendly dashboard and cost-effectiveness, make it an excellent choice for businesses of all sizes.

With appNeura, businesses can improve their overall application performance, reduce downtime, and enhance their customers’ digital experience. Additionally, appNeura’s AI-driven analytics provide valuable insights into application performance, allowing businesses to make data-driven decisions.

If you’re looking for an efficient and reliable APM solution, appNeura is the way to go. Don’t just take our word for it, try appNeura today and see the difference it can make to your business! Contact us now.